Interview: Javier Bardem and Alejandro Amenabar

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The star and director of The Sea Inside discuss the powerful film.

By Jeff Otto

Alejandro Amenabar's new film, The Sea Inside, is a departure from his previous two thriller films, the brain twisting Open Your Eyes and the chilling, quiet horror of The Others. Amenabar says he was touched by the words of Ramon Sampedro in his book, Letters from Hell, a journal that Sampedro wrote during his 30-year struggle for his right to die with dignity.

In the film based on his life, Javier Bardem plays Ramon Sampedro. As a young man, Sampedro broke his neck while diving into the ocean. The accident left him a quadriplegic, without the use of his body below the neck. After living such an active and fruitful life as a young man, Sampedro made the decision almost immediately that he would rather die than live out his life in this condition. During his long campaign to choose his own fate, Sampedro's condition did not prevent him from finding companionship with many people, including a few women who even desired to marry him. Belen Rueda plays Julia, who makes up an amalgam of the women that loved Sampedro over the years, and Lola Duenas plays Rosa, a local woman who befriends him and tries to convince him to live out his life. Sampedro's family also tries to convince him, but his desire to end his life never changes.

While the mood of the film is obviously a somber one, Amenabar doesn't see Sampedro's story as a sad one. Despite his desire to end his life, Sampedro led a very full life and touched many lives along the way. Bardem's portrayal of Sampedro is one of the year's top performances. The immensely talented actor is virtually unrecognizable as the older man.

IGN FilmForce spoke with Amenabar and Bardem in Los Angeles recently about the controversial and moving film, The Sea Inside.

Since the story takes place later in Sampedro's life, with the exception of flashbacks to the accident, taking on the role required Bardem to undergo a startling physically transformation through the aid of prosthetics. The whole process took Bardem five to six hours every morning. "I'd go there five o'clock in the morning, I'd start shooting 11 until 10 PM. There was only one piece which was the nose. The rest was like a liquid to age the skin. When I first saw myself [it helped], because you are always concerned about the makeup work, especially when you are going to do a character movie instead of an action movie&#Array;"

Bardem (left) on set with Amenabar (right)

The actual accident sequence, in which Bardem dives into the sea and his neck crashes against the ocean floor, is startling to watch. It looks so real, it's almost hard to see how Amenabar shot the scene. "That's a shot in the open sea," Amenabar says. "We made it faster. The moment he crashes against the ground, that was made faster, and then slower again. Yeah, I guess you sometimes have risk, of course. I didn't think Javier was going to break his neck. We had trained before in a swimming pool to see how he could do it, so he would put first his arm so that would protect him."

Remaining motionless is much more difficult than it sounds. Once Bardem got into the character, he was able to adapt to the motionless performance. "If I say no, that will sound very awkward, so I will say yes, but no actually. Sometimes when scenes are long, when I have to be like that, sometimes the tension&#Array; But also, they have this response, involuntary response and sometimes they have spasms. You just breathe and relax and let the body weight into the bed. Put the whole energy up in the voice and in the look and try to focus on the words, instead of the actions&#Array; So talking without doing any action, just being still, it's a matter of focusing on being very concentrated."

While Sea Inside tackles the similar themes of life and death from Amenabar's other films, this is a much more straightforward and outwardly dramatic work than his previous work. "It's something that, over the path of time, I've been falling in love with this story," Amenabar says. "In the beginning, it was the cast itself. It was interesting for me and to many people, then it was the book, and the talked about life and death and love. These were very general concept that I really understood and they were really well written, but I could make a film of it. Then it was when I researched his real life and I was told about all the anecdotes and how all these women were falling in love with him, that I thought it could make a good love story from one point.

"I guess that I might have connected with Sampedro somehow from the beginning. I guess that the first question I might have asked myself was, 'What would I want to do if I was in that situation?' Now I think that I would, I think, I'm not sure of course, that I would go on living, I would get through it. But that, then comes the second question, should then I cheer him up and tell him that life is so beautiful, or telling him that his life doesn't belong to him, that it belongs to someone else? I think that simple reasoning gives me the answer."